Chased by almonds

In Denmark, most of cookies, bread products and even some cakes contain almonds, not sweet almonds but bitter ones. When you bite a cookie with a big and impatient appetite created by the cookie’s pretty appearance in your imagination, bitter almond’s sharp and miserable taste occupies all your taste receptors which are intended to help you enjoy sensing the savour of delicious and pleasant food.

In order to avoid eatables containing bitter almond pieces or taste, one should learn how the word “almond” is written in Danish first. Because information about ingredients of any product is written only in Danish. So, almond is "mendal", bitter almond is "bitter mendal".

I and my wife have been chased by bitter almonds since we came to Denmark. A real and bright example of this chase can be seen in the picture uploaded: these cute cookies taste bitter almond and we bought them (without being aware of its taste) about a month ago and both of us trying to finish it by eating one cookie in two or three days.

Now, we try to find food which does not contain bitter almond by patiently reading the information about ingredients and sometimes it is a long and boring process. This process occurs approximately as follows:

1. I go to a supermarket with my wife.

2. My wife sees a huge number of cookies (she loves to eat sweet cookies with tea or coffee. I am not a big fan of sweet things, so usually an idea to buy cookies or something like that is not initiated by me).

3. Desire to eat them with hot drink emerges in her mind.

4. She tries to find some cookies without bitter almond taste by reading ingredient labels of cookies one by one.

5. She asks me to help her in this boring activity.

6. Both of us read lots of ingredient labels.

7. We choose a package of cookies which we think does not contain bitter almonds.

8. However, we still doubt it might contain these bitter hard-shelled fruits.

9. We ask someone who works in the supermarket if the cookies does not have bitter almonds.

10. Finally, we decide to buy it or not.

Oh, life is so complicated.